PARIS
France's health minister Marisol Touraine on Friday gave the green light to use 'experimental drugs' for the treatment of the French Médecins Sans Frontières health worker infected with the Ebola virus in Liberia on Tuesday.
Touraine lifted restrictions on the import and use of three treatments for Ebola that are still at the experimental stage - Favipiravir from Japan, ZMapp from the U.S. and TKM-100-802 from Canada.
The volunteer, who was working for the non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontieres in Liberia, was infected by the Ebola virus on Tuesday and was placed in quarantine in the Liberian capital of Monrovia.
Touraine said the French nurse who is being treated at the Begin military hospital in the commune of Val-de-Marne in Paris - one of the nine French hospitals placed on alert since the beginning of August, took the medication as soon as she arrived.
"She is receiving experimental treatment," Touraine confirmed in a statement.
The World Health Organization called for more medics to be deployed to help combat the virus after the death toll reached 2,453, with 4,963 cases of infections being confirmed in West Africa.
The high infection rate among health workers has made it difficult to recruit the foreign medical staff needed to combat the epidemic.
Ebola first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It can be transmitted to humans from wild animals and also spreads through contact with the body fluids of an infected person.
U.S. President Barack Obama outlined plans for dealing with Ebola during a visit to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Tuesday.
They include sending 3,000 troops to Liberia to set up a joint force command, a staging base in Senegal and additional treatment units across West Africa.
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